It's not a set in stone ratio. The way the chips are designed, you don't need nearly the mhz for Mac programs. I mean, if you look at Apple's favorite demo, Photoshop. You run Photoshop on a Dual 1ghz G4 and you'll get speeds that won't be seen on the PC side until well into the 3ghz chips. But that's Photoshop.
If you're looking for things like games, PCs have always been able to run them faster (prolly thanks to ****ty ports, but let's not go there).
Running a program on a 1ghz G4 Mac is not equal to running a program on a 1ghz P3. If you want own a Dual 1ghz G4, you have the fastest computer Apple offers. It's not as slow as if you were running a dual 1ghz P3 setup. But it's not a set in stone thing like 1 Apple mhz = 5 Intel mhz.
From an article trying to explain why the 1.8ghz P4 is only 12% faster than a 1ghz P3:
Quote:
Intel likes to sell the clock speed of its chips, since it's something consumers think they understand. That speed is measured in cycles per second - actually in megahertz, or millions of cycles per second (MHz) and gigahertz (billions of cycles per second). The problem is that different processors do different amounts of work in each clock cycle. That's why it's hard to compare the true speed of chips from different manufacturers based on their specifications alone.
Apple has had this problem for years. The Motorola-built G4 processor in Apple's high-end Macintoshes is often faster than Intel's P4 in real life. But because it processes instructions differently (and more efficiently in some cases), the G4's official clock speed is far lower. AMD's Athlon chips, which compete directly with Intel in the PC market, are comparable to the P4 in performance but also operate at slower clock speeds.
As it turns out, the P4 - released in November 2000 - was designed to run at a higher clock speed than its predecessor. But it does less work with each clock cycle than the old PIII.
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